Month: May 2021

Opening 18 May – 31 October 2021 | Tue-Sun 10.00-17.00

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery | Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1RL

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Sarah Waiswa, a documentary and portrait photographer based in Kenya, will be collaborating with the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection at Bristol Archives. The exhibition will showcase a selection of her contemporary portraits of African people alongside portraits from the archives in a thought-provoking display, to reframe and challenge existing narratives around colonialism, power and identity. Sarah draws heavily on the captions of the archive images in her interpretation, and one of these has been used as the title of the exhibition.

Sarah Waiswa has collaborated with the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection (BECC) at Bristol Archives to create the exhibition Lips Touched with Blood. Waiswa’s contemporary portraits of African people will be displayed alongside manipulated portraits from the archive to reframe and challenge existing narratives around colonialism, power and identity. 

“This project deals with the impact of colonialism on identity in Kenya. The archival images show the power imbalance that existed between the colonialists and the natives. In the archival images, the photographers had the power to define the narrative. They presented the people in the way they saw them, and not necessarily as who they were. The Kenyans pictured are seen but not really seen. To me the people are subjects in someone else’s story and not their own. They are illustrations. The captions on the photos are a further expression of this perception. The colonialist’s research is more important than the person in the photo.

By blacking-out the subjects, I interrupt that colonial gaze and take the power away from the photographer. I hope the viewer will ask themselves “who are these people?” That is the question I wish the photographer would have asked. By juxtaposing my images of young Kenyans, I hope that the images can speak to each other. I hope that it can show a reclamation of identity. There was erasure in colonial time. This project is an attempt to reconstruct and recreate the subjects’ own identity on their own terms.’

The exhibition’s title, Lips Touched with Blood is drawn from the caption of a portrait from the archives taken in 1953. The photograph was taken after an alleged Mau Mau cleansing ceremony shortly after the Lari massacre and there is much ambiguity in both the photograph and the caption. It is not clear if the man depicted was connected to the Mau Mau and their atrocities, or if he were an innocent local resident, smeared by sensationalist British propaganda about the Mau Mau. Waiswa was drawn to this photograph as the look on the man’s face is one of power, which is absent from many images taken in the colonial period.

The archive photographs in Lips Touched with Blood are from the British Empire & Commonwealth Collection. The archive contains around half a million photographs from the countries of the former British empire, alongside film, oral history, objects and documents. The photographs date from 1860 to the 1970s, and were mostly taken by British travellers.

Sarah Waiswa is a documentary and portrait photographer based in Nairobi, Kenya. She was invited to collaborate with the archives on this exhibition as she has a particular interest in exploring identity on the African continent. Sarah had access to thousands of digitised archive images via the new BECC online catalogue, from which she made her final selection. The BECC team are working on various other projects with audiences in postcolonial countries and diaspora communities worldwide to restore as much context to their collection as possible.

Opening 18 May – 10 October 2021 | Tue-Sun 10.00-17.00

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery | Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1RL

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Artists Heather Agyepong, Jessa Fairbrother, and Lua Ribeira have collaborated with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. In a series of separate interventions, the  artists’ own work will be displayed alongside and interspersed with the Museum’s collections to encourage new dialogues around the works.

Memorialization in the Age of Forgetting | Heather Agyepong

Heather Agyepong utilises her own image in her photography, performing a catalogue of identities that have paraded through colonial discourse on African peoples. ‘Too many blackamoors’ quotes a letter from Queen Elizabeth I and Agyepong performs cartes de visites (visiting cards) by Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the West African god daughter of Queen Victoria. Her work will be shown among the Grand Tour paintings from the 18th century offering a postcolonial perspective on the gallery. 

In Conversation, and In Character | Jessa Fairbrother

Jessa Fairbrother explores images of femininity through the lens of psychoanalysis, the relationship between mother and daughter, motherhood and loss. She often (but not always) uses her own body, along with personal photographs which she embellishes with stitch, or punctures. Her work will be shown among the museum’s renowned Pre-Raphaelite paintings and modern French art, presenting self-authored contemporary narratives alongside the historic images of women by men. 

Click on the images to see the virtual tours.

Craving Gaps | Lua Ribeira

Lua Ribeira brings a vivid intensity to her photographs which aim to question the role images play in the social construction of groups. She collaborates with her subjects and there is a spiritual dimension to the images that has affinities with Renaissance art on the one hand and formal aspects of abstract painting on the other. Ribeira is interested in the idea of being transported – by synthetic, aesthetic or religious means – and alludes to angels and demons in her work. Her photographs, belonging to various series, will be shown amongst the angels and demons of Solario and Bellini.

Click on the images to see the virtual tours.

Opening 18 May – 31 October 2021 | Tue-Sun 10.00-17.00

Bristol Museum & Art Gallery | Queens Rd, Bristol BS8 1RL

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James Barnor was Ghana’s first international press photographer working from his studio Ever Young at the time of independence (1957) and selling his pictures to the Daily Graphic and Drum magazines. He came to Britain in 1959, photographing London and returning to Accra where he established X23, the city’s first colour photography studio. Ghanaian Photographer showcases Barnor’s Black modernism, a fusion of pan- African futurism and 1970s style.

A new retrospective exhibition by photographer James Barnor draws on previously unpublished work to demonstrate his modernism and inherent skill as a colourist. 

James Barnor (b.1929) was Ghana’s first international press photographer. He came from a family of photographers and established his own studio in Accra, Ever Young in 1950. He worked from this studio at the time of Ghana’s independence whilst also selling his pictures to the Daily Graphic and Drum magazines. He came to Britain in 1959, and whilst working in a factory, he took photography evening classes at the London College of Printmaking and lessons with the Colour Processing Laboratory in Kent. He went on to study at Medway College of Arts, eventually returning to Accra in 1969, where he established X23, the city’s first colour photography studio. He returned to London in the 1990s.

In 2009 the 80 year-old photographer revealed his archive to two London curators. His archive is a remarkable document of post-war modernity spanning photographs from the time of Ghana’s independence, scenes of multicultural London, and later images recording a strong postcolonial identity in Ghana. The metaphor of the road in the book’s title, suggests the continuity between the past and the present, tradition and progress, and the links between generations and peoples of different contents present in Barnor’s work.

The earliest photographs in the book and exhibition include lively street scenes taken in Accra after Barnor had been encouraged by Jim Bailey, editor of Drum, to record Ghanaian Independence. These are contrasted with his composed studio portraits taken at Ever Young, showing his photographic range from the start of his career. An image of Barnor himself captured working in the Agfa-Gevaert in Mortsel, Belgium, 1969 and an image of a print in progress, made at Studio X23, Accra, c. 1972, offers insights to his working practice. Once in London, both Barnor’s commissioned magazine work and his informal photographs of friendships recorded the diversification of Britain. Later works include an alternative image to his well-known vivid portrait of an assistant at Sick-Hagemeyer department store posing with coloured canisters, and a photograph of a model posing for the Agip F1 calendar in a wax-print dress, signalling her postcolonial identity.

Click on the image below to visit the virtual tour.